Bar Exam

A small party of wildly optimistic citizens are willing to bet that
I can write a weekly, non-sports column that will keep people
awake for as long as three minutes,” begins Emmett Watson’s first
column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in August of 1956. (It
goes on to say that others are betting against this, then to discuss
matters such as rabid fans saving cups of water from a pool in which
Elvis had swum.) Watson’s column persisted for approximately an
eternity (later, more soporifically at the Seattle Times) before
he slipped off into the eternal night (as did the P-I itself recently, at least in any form that Watson would recognize).

The column hangs on the wall in the small dining room of Emmett
Watson’s Oyster Bar among fishing nets, life rings, and so
forth. (“Most people have a hard time finding us the first time,”
says the curly-haired barkeep. “Actually, the second time, too.” It’s
in the recesses of an arcade on Pike Place between Virginia and Stewart
or, alternately, down those weird steps in Post Alley near the Pink
Door.) The dining room is fine, but once you locate it, keep walking
toward the back. The bar is even more nautical and more awesome,
with brass portholes and oak paneling and assorted decorative detritus.
Four swivel barstools are mended with duct tape, and there’s seating at
an island in the middle; that’s about the size of it.

The place’s motto is “Beer, Wine, and Food for Thought, Est. 1978.”
The Life Aquatic is playing on a television, while people
engulf oysters on the half shell. (Oysters are $9.75 a half dozen,
a daily variety served no-nonsense with cocktail sauce and lemon. Also
excellent: the clam chowder, $3.50 cup/$4.50 bowl.) The menus are
famously handwritten on stained loaf-of-bread-sized paper bags, except
that they’re actually printed and only look like they’re handwritten.
They are prized as Seattle souvenirs, but the printing is
expensive, and the staff watches them like hawks. It’s a family-run
place, now owned by the son of Emmett Watson’s original business
partners. But “family-run” makes it sound creaky (as does, it must be
admitted, “Emmett Watson’s”), when in fact everyone working is young
and kind of punk rock and friendly and also hot.

Before Emmett Watson’s closes at around 7:00 p.m., more young,
kind-of-punk-rock, friendly, also-hot people arrive—they all work
at the Market, and this is their happy-hour spot. The story of the day:
One of them (lovely with a sea foam green stripe in her hair)
lost the diamond out of her grandmother’s ring, then, at the insistence
of another vendor, undertook a seemingly hopeless search. They found
the diamond in a crack in the Market’s tile floor.